ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: September 2010

Pervasive 2011, the Ninth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, will be held June 12-15, 2011 in San Francisco, California.

The paper submission deadline is Monday October 11, 2010 at midnight US/Pacific time.

Pervasive is a premier international conference for cutting edge research on the architecture, design, implementation, application and evaluation of pervasive computing technologies. The conference places strong emphasis on both the technological innovation aspects of the field of pervasive computing as well as the ways in which these emerging technologies affect and influence everyday life. Read more on Call: Pervasive 2011…

[From IEEE Spectrum, part of a special report on telepresence that features much supplemental and related material]

When My Avatar Went to Work

A robot surrogate took my place at the office. Here’s why one may take yours, too

By Erico Guizzo / September 2010

As I come down the hallway, heads start popping out of cubicles and offices, all eyes turning in my direction. Some of my colleagues laugh, some frown. One looks terrified and flees. That’s what happens, I suppose, when you show up at the office as a robot.

The robot is acting as my stand-in at work. For a week last spring, it roamed around IEEE Spectrum‘s New York City office while I sat in my pajamas at home in Brooklyn. From my laptop, over the Net, I could steer the robot, peer through its cameras, and talk to my colleagues. It’s a bit like a video game, but instead of a virtual character, you’re controlling a real avatar. Read more on Robot telepresence: When my avatar went to work…

“Providence is always on the side of the last reserve” Napoleon Bonaparte

WHAT ARE THE PROVIDENCE EXPERIMENTS?

The Providence Experiments are a unique series of workshops and events that fuse experimentation, visualisation, ritual, psychological intervention and immersive game. Test subjects will be thrust into bizarre events that offer the willing participant the opportunity to undergo a challenging yet positive artistic transfor…mation.

Over one lunar calendar month, you will receive spontaneous transmissions, puzzles, choices and oddities that may pervade any and every part of your life. Prepare your mind for anything.

This experience will be designed specifically for YOU. Perception of self and reality will constantly be challenged. We will initiate you into in a unique journey where you are the hero or villain in your own story.

The aim of the Providence Experiments is to unleash your subconscious creative potential while offering an amazing, unprecedented experience unlike anything you’ve likely participated in before.

The Providence Experiments will consist of one set session per week in Central London over five weeks, starting Friday 5th November. Specialised directions to each venue will be transmitted 5 days before each session. Read more on Call: The Providence Experiments…

[Image: Psychologist Kieron O’Connor, shown with a computer screen loaded with 3-D images from a hoarder’s stash, is conducting research into virtual reality therapies at the University of Quebec Outaouais in Gatineau.]

Hoarding: The virtual reality of clutter

By Maria Cook September 28, 2010

Psychologist Kieron O’Connor has compiled a list 30 pages long of different objects he has seen hoarders accumulate. The list includes newspapers, empty cornflake packages and toilet paper rolls.

“It’s a very difficult problem to treat,” he says. “People collect things and they can’t get rid of them. They build up at home and often take over so the person has no living space.”

O’Connor, with two colleagues, is studying whether virtual reality could be a possible treatment for hoarding. It is believed to be the first study of its kind in Canada. It takes place at the University of Quebec Outaouais (UQO) in Gatineau. The university is one of the few in North America doing research in cyberpsychology. Read more on Using virtual reality to treat hoarding…

The workshop is about the design of the game interface, its philosophies, its foibles, its moments of achievement and delight with a view to the next generation of game design. We are interested in taking this “long engagement” to its logical next step, where the two partners in the relationship (game interface design and HCI) act as equal participants in the design and evolution of new and innovative experiences.

TOKYO, Japan — High atop a 30-foot tower built to showcase Microsoft’s new Xbox360 Kinect, Japanese models kitted out in short-shorts, pigtails and sneakers scrambled to kick their virtual selves into high gear before a giant, cinema-sized screen.

As they jumped and ducked, and their on-screen icons — the popular skateboarders from Sega’s new Sonic Free Riders game — raced and soared through the technicolor virtual landscape, it was hard to draw the line between the real and the surreal.

While you weren’t paying attention, the global videogame industry has surpassed the movie business and the music business to become the highest-grossing entertainment industry in the world — bringing in about $20 billion a year.

That’s right. The premier of a top title like Halo: Reach, the latest in a series of futuristic war games developed by a company called Bungie, is as big an event as the opening of a new flick from James Cameron or Steven Spielberg — both of whom have put their names behind top-flight game titles.

Tripling the opening weekend gross of Inception, Halo: Reach alone did $200 million in business on the first day of sales, which coincided with TGS, held Sept. 16-19 in Tokyo’s Makuhari Messe.

And gaming console technologies like Microsoft Kinect’s motion-sensitive game play (which makes Nintendo’s Wii look like Pong) and Nintendo’s glasses-free 3DS are actually pushing the cutting edge of computing.

But what’s on display at TGS is not so much the technological advances in gaming — where the West has actually outstripped Japan in recent years, with biggies like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty coming out of Scotland and California.

Sponsored by The Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS).

As part of the 2011 Spring Simulation Multi-conference (SpringSim’11; http://www.scs.org/springsim/2011) the 2011 Agent-Directed Simulation Symposium is a premier platform to explore all three aspects of the synergy of simulation and agent technologies. Hence, it has a special place within simulation and agent conferences, including agent-based (social) simulation conferences. Therefore the ADS symposium fills a gap in the agent community as well as the simulation community.

The purpose of the ADS symposium is to facilitate dissemination of the most recent advancements in the theory, methodology, application, and toolkits of agent-directed simulation. Agent-directed simulation is comprehensive in the integration of agent and simulation technologies, by including models that use agents to develop domain-specific simulations, i.e., agent simulation (this is often referred to as agent-based simulation -when other two important aspects are not considered), and by also including the use of agent technology to develop simulation techniques and toolkits that are subsequently applied, either with or without agents. Read more on Call: Agent-Directed Simulation Symposium (ADS’11)…

‘Brave New Worlds – the Ethics of Education in Popular Digital Technologies’

The Higher Education Academy has funded the Learning Lab to support a Special Interest Group (SIG) that explores the ‘informal’ ethics of educational interventions in popular digital technologies and as part of its activity, a one-day event has been planned to discuss and explore this area. A more detailed overview is below.

Event Details

This event be hosted by Kathryn Trinder at Glasgow Caledonian University on Wednesday 27 October 2010 between 10am – 3pm. Places are available at £40 per person which is inclusive of refreshments and lunch.

There’s a venerable story about the painter Constable which is often cited by writers who want us to recognise that he was a modern pioneer, rather than an exemplar of chocolate-box traditionalism. He was having an argument with a friend about conventions of representation in landscape painting. The friend was trying to persuade him to paint grass as Poussin did, in the honeyed tones of an antique violin. To refute him, it’s said, Constable took a violin and laid it on the lawn, inviting him to make a direct comparison between the two. Painted grass should be the same colour as real grass, was his point.

I’ve always wondered, reading this story, whether the friend caved in immediately or whether he replied that painted grass isn’t actually grass at all – and thus can be pretty much any colour the artist wants to make it. But I don’t think you’re meant to think that. It’s really a story about clarity of perception triumphing over hidebound convention.

I encountered a variation on it the other day while walking round Tate Britain’s exhibition of the work of Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian photographer and pioneer – I guess – of stop-motion photography. In a newspaper article about his studies of motion, Muybridge once claimed that the painter Frederic Leighton had confessed that he burst out laughing when he first saw the photographs of horses galloping. He knew what a running horse should look like – from countless equestrian paintings – and alongside that preconception these photographs appeared comically wrong. Then, according to Muybridge, Leighton looked a little closer and realised that he would have to adjust his notion of verisimilitude. Like the Constable anecdote, it’s a story that has clear-sighted truth triumphing over inherited tradition. It goes with the grain of a scientific notion of progress in which error cedes to discovered truth.